Indeed, most of the time, if you try and fight the big monster without having done some work to discover how to fight it, you’re almost certain to die. But there have been a ton of supplements and additions to Call of Cthulhu over the years (including licensed properties) so if you want to run a CoC game set in pretty much any historical era you could likely find rules for it.Īlthough the Basic RP system absolutely can be used for a fantasy RPG not entirely dissimilar from D&D - if that’s what you’re looking for, I recommend RuneQuest - with Call of Cthulhu you’re looking at a horror focused RPG that’s as much or more about investigating and discovery as it is fighting. Of all these settings, the most supported are probably Delta Green which takes conspiracy theories and X-Files style paranoia and fuses it with the Mythos and the aforementioned Cthulhu by Gaslight. But there’s also Cthulhu by Gaslight which lets you move the game to 1890’s London so you can have Jack the Ripper or Sherlock Holmes show up if you’d like, and further books and settings exist that allow for squamos bloated monstrosities from beyond the stars who look on all human life with the dispassion and alienation of a cosmic storm to show up in the year 1000 AD, Ancient Rome, the 23rd Century, and even “modern” times. The original game has a default setting of the 1920’s, the era most of Lovecraft’s original stories were set in. There are multiple settings available for Call of Cthulhu. You can bring Cthulhu into almost any world Bringing them to life in a game. It doesn’t actually do that. Here’s a sample Call of Cthulhu character sheet so you get the idea.īasic RP is a pretty flexible system - it’s heavy on skills, and has been used in games ranging from swords and sorcery ( RuneQuest and Stormbringer/Elric) to Superhero ( Superworld) to occult weirdness ( Nephilim) and in the case of Call of Cthulhu, it’s being used to bring to life loathsome abhorrent entities from beyond existence. And with over 40 skills, you have plenty of opportunities to make those rolls. It’s based on the notion of rolling under a skill level - if you have a 66 in History, for example, a roll of 66 or lower on your percentile dice is a success. It’s a percentile based system, which means it uses percentile dice (two 10 sided die) to resolve its rolls instead of a single d20 like Dungeons and Dragons. Since it’s a Chaosium RPG, it uses what is now called the Basic RP system, which is designed around seven core characteristics: Size, Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Power, and Appearance. The first edition of Call of Cthulhu came out in 1981, which means it’ll be forty next year. In CoC, the unknown is unknown because knowing it could kill you, or worse, drive you mad. It’s a world where fear is the oldest and strongest emotion, and the oldest and strongest fear is the fear of the unknown. The default setting for the game is the world evoked by Lovecraft and his successors with the Cthulhu Mythos stories. In a horror story - and in Call of Cthulhu - the fear is the point. It’s similar to the difference between a Lovecraft story and a Robert E. Call of Cthulhu is entirely designed to give the fantastic and otherworldly aspects of its setting that kind of weight. An encounter with a monster in a horror RPG is a much more dreadful and terrifying thing because that’s the whole point of horror in the first place. But the real difference is more in how they approach things. Much as horror and fantasy fiction are cousins that focus on different aspects of the fantastic, so too with horror RPGs vs fantasy RPGs. Sometimes, a game is more about the experience, and the odds of your character surviving two sessions with all their faculties are remote - and that’s the point.Ĭall of Cthulhu, the long-running TTRPG by Chaosium, is a game much more about bringing that feeling of cosmic horror and creeping dread to life than it is about high epic adventure.Ĭall of Cthulhu is what’s called a horror role playing game. Certain games are not about growing in power and taking on ever more potent monsters for loot.
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